New York’s crackdown on Airbnb began Tuesday
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There's more at stake than apt size and rent in a city where you spend most of your time not in the apt. This changes as you age.
New Yorkers live longer than suburban Americans. One can have many complaints about a modern urban lifestyle, but health isn’t one of them.
You are though, most nights too, because there might be a million options but a normal person needs to rest and recharge at home a lot of the time.
It’s around $2k after adjusting for not having to own a car [1]. Also, a solo studio is a luxurious way to live in New York. If you’re economising, you get roommates.
[1] https://www.moneygeek.com/insurance/auto/analysis/costs-of-c....
You didn't add in the cost of taxis and trains.
> Also, a solo studio is a luxurious way to live in New York
A cramped crappy apartment with no bedroom is not luxurious just because it's more expensive than a crappier shared apartment with no bedroom.
Sure, add back $200/month. It’s still night and day to owning a private car.
> cramped crappy apartment with no bedroom is not luxurious just because it's more expensive than a crappier shared apartment with no bedroom
I mean, my friend’s $5mm new build skipped on radiant heating. (And the marble was cut mid seam!) Clearly not luxury, eh?
In this case, the cost premium is prima facie evidence of private living conditions’ luxury.
Edit: averaged over ten years and a week my numbers will look different, as my car was stolen this morning.
Recognizing the limitations of an Internet comment, I’m sincerely sorry you need to deal with the headache of a stolen vehicle.
- you know what
I can understand how AirBnB might raise rent prices.
I can understand how that's a serious problem, and agree it should be dealt with.
But seriously, as a home-owner, why shouldn't I be allowed to rent out any amount of space in my own property arbitrarily to whoever I so please for a short term without seeking a loicense from my central government?
This isn't meant to be argumentative. Why should anyone have the right to tell me who I can and cannot shelter under my own roof if they aren't a criminal?
Or, more-specifically, because concerns like this have to be weighed by effect: is the problem really so bad that it merits usurping someone's right to use their property in order to counteract? I do own a house, but I don't live in a metro area, so I could use some perspective.
Workers need a place to live. They cant forgo a place to live if they cant afford it like they can with a big screen tv. These AirBnB entrepreneurs are taking housing stock out of circulation for local workers to rent/live in.
Housing is not your typical commodity.
Desirable places like NYC have always been competitive markets to rent in, and we know that there’s a long term trend of migration toward population centers which is slowly making things worse.
But there’s another factor that seems like it isn’t getting it’s fair share of blame - the accelerant that is social media. There’s been a huge rise in micro-influencers showing us what the good life looks like in desirable places, whether we are talking about a neighborhood of NYC or a western mountain town. A decade or two ago, these desirable places were on the radar of a small number of people (relative to today) as viable places to build a life in, now the pool is much larger.
Airbnb deserves some criticism, but it certainly seems like short term rentals are getting more than their fair share of blame because they are a convenient boogeyman to point at. The end result is that we see regulations like this one that are more punitive than effective.
I can't count the number of cheesy, narcissistic/artistic films I've seen centred around New York/Paris/London where people's accents are overblown beyond credibility and the main protagonist is exceedingly rich to live out the life that they do... but is unaware of their exceeding wealth and is therefore unable to communicate that to the audience.
As a decent earner, I cannot find myself relating to these characters in these settings since its like watching a millionaire discussing their financial problems.... but my girlfriend and her friends all seem to love and relate to the characters and the depicted "normal" lifestyle, despite sharing nothing in common.
and that fantasy of being subsidized by said obliviously wealthy is probable enough to attain by your girlfriend and her friends if they focus on that part of their culture
if this option was available for you it would be something to fawn over and much easier to relate
I rented in NYC for more than 20 years, coming and going as life and work demanded.
Beginning in about 2015, it felt like half of the acceptable rental apartments in desirable neighborhoods disappeared - all lost to SRT.
Not only did that make finding an apartment harder, it dramatically increased landlords' leverage wrt pricing and lease terms.
On more than one occasion we had to rent vie AirBnB - at in insane markup over markets rents - while searching, full-time, for a place to live longer term.
Before YouTube, most people know New York only from highly unrealistic sitcoms like Friends. Now you can have virtual tour through several apartments and streets, and see it for yourself.
Rewritten:
> A large percentage of real estate is being purchased as investments and geopolitical hedges by extremely wealthy individuals. In many cases, this can be be literally to assist in money laundering. This effect is especially pronounced in "global cities" (NYC, London, Paris, LA, Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai, etc.), and especially in politically stable countries (So that probably excludes Shanghai). These are usually left empty, because income isn't their primary goal. This is considered to be a significant effect because the property types are those intended to be purchased by owner-occupants (e.g. condos), and therefore the supply is consumed. The complaint is not that the new owner of a massive apartment complex is a different major corporation/rich person. Really rich people will prevent any form of correction to the market so they do not lose wealth.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-set-unveil-long-awaited-...
> the "planetary elite" invest their (ill-gotten) money in real estate, and Airbnb simply offers the best return. but that's not Airbnb's fault. GP further doubts that reglations affecting the interests of said elites will work.
Airbnb is richly profiting from the misery though. Theyre not an innocent bystander.
fully remote without pay reduction + top pay + great WLB (less than 30 hours/week) = awesome job.
taking away airbnb's eligibility would just be disastrous for the employees who worked hard to get in
The optimist in me hopes the housing crisis may finally start to wake people up to how most of us are being systematically exploited and we live in a society that deliberately withholds shelter, which quite literally kills people, so a tiny number of people can profit from it.
And Airbnb certainly has at least somewhat of a role to play.
I'm suspecting this might change, as NYC is more politically diverse than places like San Francisco and Seattle, and pendulums swing hard back and forth historically.
Immigration is just another one of these types of these issues that's not well understood by upper-class liberals, is my speculation. Conversations with people and observations are making me think the migrant issue has potential to galvanize the working class to oppose it.
If you are caught without being registered, your property is taken and sold off in a auction.
I appreciated that I was able to experiment with different neighborhoods without being limited to those where hotels were available.
I just can’t seem to get the math to pencil so that the amount of investor owned Airbnbs would make a meaningful impact on the rents/prices…
My main point being that people expecting any sort of regulation on Airbnb to have an effect on pricing seems naive.
Just LOL
If you believe is that New Jersey is just waiting in the wings to take tourism from NYC I've got a bridge in Brooklyn available for a good price.
I have family that stays in Stamford Connecticut whenever they want to do stuff in NYC, because they find it cheaper/easier to stay there and take the train in.
I am understanding of the arguments against Airbnb's, but they really need to allow more hotels to be built. The amount of money they can bring in (raised entirely from people out of state) is large and shouldn't be thrown away.
Edit - actually they are just strictly regulated. I know my friend gave up hosting after the law went in. https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2682
Lin-Manuel didn’t invent the phrase, and I wonder if the original meaning was more in the spirit of “New Yorkers can get away with violating NJ laws” rather than “New Jersey literally has no laws”.
https://www.revolutionarywarnewjersey.com/new_jersey_revolut...
Jersey City has become fairly interesting, but I don't see tourists from Sweden going to stay there so they can visit the Empire State Building.
Let's entertain the idea for just a minute that you are an extended family visiting NYC. You need 2-3 bedrooms, some amount of space to spread out, and a kitchen could potentially save you some real money vs. eating out for every meal.
Hotel rooms like that really don't exist, at least for normal people. On Airbnb you could probably find a comfortable luxury condo that checks every one of those boxes and saves you thousands of dollars compared to booking 3 hotel rooms.
Sometimes we’ll cook dinner in our unit too, especially for our kids. If you’re in a city for several days, you get tired of your kids eating pizza and burgers every night because nothing else is familiar (and they do too). They welcome a healthy home cooked meal with the simple foods they are used to. As such going grocery shopping in our new city of residence is a key early part of every trip.
I think the anti-AirBnB narrative also misses a couple of other things:
- this is a huge win for hotels, and one they have lobbied for fiercely.
- there are people who own apartments in NY that couldn’t afford to live there if they weren’t able to earn some money from renting out their space on AirBnB.
Lastly, I’m willing to bet that the housing crisis in NY will continue unabated despite this move.
Yes, but also turning every apartment into a potential revenue source puts upward pressure on rents.
So there are also people who cannot afford apartments in NYC because of short-term rentals.
Do we know how many? How much of an effect is this expected to have on rents?
Plenty of hotels have rooms with two queens that can comfortably sleep 4 people.
If staying in a hotel isn't convenient or affordable I'm sorry? Perhaps one day you can figure it out.
Airbnb could have gone to fix that. Why leave it to regulation?
when? they’ve had years. companies can’t logically fail to address a well known problem and then complain when regulations happen. there’s a sure way to slow regulations—address problems that you know will lead to regulation. don’t do… nothing, and then complain.
Is there a particular reason why extended stay hotels don't work out for that kind of stay? They typically have a kitchen, fridge, and laundry facilities.
They're more or less common in different countries, and sometimes are fairly pricy, although perhaps not compared to several hotel rooms. I've seen them most often in places you'd expect families to visit, like non-city tourist destinations.
Isn't new jersey right across the river from new york, with rapid transit lines going into new york? Your "2 hours" estimate seems wildly inflated.
In Chongqing, map apps will often recommend a "nearby" restaurant which actually is several hundred meters away, vertically; you'll have to descend many stair steps before arriving at that restaurant, even though it looked so close on the map. In other words, the restaurant was not actually "close", when it comes to the time and energy investment required.
In this same spirit, New Jersey is absolutely not "close" to Manhattan, even if it looks close on maps. Traffic sucks, public transportation sucks, bridges and tunnels suck.
Staying in Jersey City or Hoboken could definitely be an option for people who don’t need to be stumbling distance from bars.
any rentals less than 30 days are not allowed unless it’s a room in your house, that you live in, and you have to be there, present, while the guests are there.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/nyregion/airbnb-jersey-ci...